Are your employer branding efforts a flop? Are you struggling to create and execute a powerful branding strategy to attract the best talent? Have you been frustrated with misperceptions about your company as an employer? If you answered yes to these questions, you might have an employer branding problem, and the cause may be surprising to you.
In many cases, employer branding troubles come down to a single explanation. You don’t have the right people involved. If you’ve shut your marketing department out of the employer branding conversation, then you have effectively sabotaged your efforts.
Isn’t HR the Team to Lead Employer Branding Efforts?
Absolutely! The HR team and recruiting staff should take the lead here. They have the best understanding of the company’s overall recruiting goals. HR is also in the best position to communicate the company’s value to potential employees in terms of company culture, work environment, compensation, and opportunities.
However, none of this means they should be the only team involved in these efforts. Marketing absolutely has a vital role to play. They bring things to the table that HR simply does not.
Think of it this way. If there were an open position on your marketing team, you would trust that department to know the qualifications they need prospective employees to have.
That doesn’t mean that you would leave HR out of the loop. Instead, you’d rely on their expertise in writing job listings and descriptions, screening candidates, and communicating with prospects about benefits and other topics. They make it easier to find the best candidates. Likewise, you need the marketing team to make your employer branding efforts most effective.
How Can Marketing Help Your Employer Branding Strategy?
While it is a great idea to bring marketing into the loop, they likely don’t have employer marketing experience. You’ll have to guide them by clearly communicating what you are doing and how they can contribute. A successful employer branding strategy will use the marketing team to:
Conduct Market Research
You already have an employer brand, even if you’ve done nothing to build it or influence it. As long as people have formed opinions about your reputation as an employer, that brand exists. Before you can create a branding strategy, you have to understand where you are currently.
To do that, you have to engage in market research to find the answers you need about your reputation among your employees, candidates you’ve interviewed in the past, and others. Members of your marketing team are going to be most qualified to conduct this research.
Do Competitive Analysis
Are you losing prospective candidates to other companies? What are they doing to attract talent that you aren’t? How do people perceive their employer branding? Just like market research, your marketing team is in the best position to analyze the competition.
Message and Communicate
Consumer marketing is all about creating and communicating the right things to the right people. That’s messaging. Marketers know how to communicate with prospective customers about the value of their company’s products and services. You can transfer those abilities to communicating with talent about your company’s value as an employer.
Create Content
Content is one of the most powerful tools you have when reaching out to potential employees, sharing information about your company culture, or showcasing the benefits of working for you.
However, in order for that content to make an impact, it has to be well-written, relevant, easy to read, and SEO-friendly. Marketing may need some help with the details, but they already have the skills to create engaging content.
Develop Candidate Personas
You’ll get more done if you truly understand whom you are trying to reach with your branding strategy. The marketing team can use its ability to create customer personas to help you build candidate personas.
Map the Employee Journey
Think of every point of contact that might occur between a job seeker and your brand. Every one of those represents an opportunity to impress by providing an excellent recruiting experience (or not). That’s the employee journey, and it’s similar to the customer journey that includes every touchpoint between a customer and brand.
Marketers understand how important it is to use these touchpoints to create great customer experiences. They can also help you identify the various touchpoints during the recruiting process and formulate ways to boost the recruiting experience.
Craft Visual Design
Recognition and recollection are an integral part of your employer brand. All of your efforts will be meaningless if prospects simply don’t remember or recognize your brand. Your marketing team can help with that.
They have access to visual assets such as logos, fonts, and color schemes. Additionally, they have probably created best practices and policies for using visuals to ensure consistency and create the visual component of your branding efforts.
Consumer and Employer Branding are Intertwined
The truth is that marketing should care about employer branding, and HR should care about consumer branding. Neither of these things exists in isolation. Both impact the other.
For example, suppose a job seeker researches a company and finds that they have a reputation for mistreating employees, fail to follow up after interviews, and pay significantly below the industry average. Well, they may decide not to pursue that job. However, some don’t stop there. They might also choose to avoid buying that company’s products and encourage others to do the same.
Similarly, if a company has a reputation for great customer service and the best products in their industry, they can attract talent simply based on their consumer reputation.
